Stress Isn’t Your Enemy

Taking power over stress with a growth mindset

Wrapping your mind around embracing stress as something that can work in your favour is easier said than done. But once you put this into practice, you will have a much clearer plan for handling your specific stressors.

Stress isn’t your enemy. You can harness it to do good in your life. It comes down to making a perspective shift in what stress means to you.

When you’re stressed, like really stressed, and you’re ready to explode this is the last thing that you want to hear. If that’s how you feel right now, take some time to recover before continuing to explore your mindset around stress.

If you’re ready to read on, let’s get to it.

Here’s the thing: We need stress to survive and thrive.

Stress is what gets us up and out the door to start our day and it drives us to want to achieve things.

How we perceive stress is a different process though.

The Two Mindsets

Our perception of stress is also known as our stress mindset.

The original work on understanding mindsets comes from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck.

In her research, she presented a series of math problems to kids and found that some would give up very quickly when the challenge became too hard while others would persevere and embrace the hard questions.

Each kid had a natural orientation towards how they approached challenges with some rising to the occasion and others backing off. It was a character trait that Dr. Dweck named their “mindset” and the good news is that mindsets can be highly influenced. (This can also be bad news, but becoming aware of mindsets helps you to make informed decisions about their power).

For example, kids who successfully answered a math problem and were told "You are very smart" internalized this praise but were fixed on the idea that it was because they were smart that they solved the problem. This can be a problem because intelligence is more of a fixed trait and not something readily changeable. So when a “smart” kid struggles with a problem, they can give up quickly and move on to something they have more of a natural inclination for.

Other children were told "You got the right answer because you worked hard for it" and these kids were found to persevere longer on the more challenging math problems because working hard is something that is directly in their power to do, even if they aren’t the smartest. Framing success around effort is a cornerstone of a growth mindset.

So while we have a natural inclination towards being growth or fixed-oriented, and the way we were raised also influences this, we can take this understanding of how to build a growth mindset and apply it to areas of our lives where we face challenges, like with stress.

Our mindset is so important for how stress impacts us.

Our mindset towards the challenges and setbacks that cause stress lives on this same teeter-totter between something to avoid at all costs because we feel helpless about it, and oriented towards growth, in which we rise to the challenge even if it’s hard.

When we are more oriented towards a fixed mindset about stress then we see it as something bad.

Something to eliminate from our lives immediately and at all costs.

There’s nothing positive or enriching at all about stress. It makes us feel burnt out and overwhelmed.

Like being bombarded by demands from every direction while struggling to catch your breath. When we feel this way there’s no chance we’re going to voluntarily place more stress on our system, at least fully consciously.

Usually, a fixed mindset about stress and seeing it as always a negative thing comes from being in the situation of having too much going on for too long, one too many times. So now getting stressed beats down your resistance to handle further stressors.

And this is indeed different for everyone. We’ll talk about it more with the Stress Sweet Spot and finding your recovery zone, but as one example, individuals still suffering from PTSD have a different recovery profile to stressors because of past trauma.

However, seeing stress from a growth mindset accepts that it’s ok to be stressed out. It’s an indication that something has challenged you, but in being challenged, you can build resilience and become stronger and capable of handling more in the future. People who are growth-minded about stress are also more willing and able to use approach techniques for managing stress so that it is resolved and doesn’t become a pervasive and nagging issue as can happen with avoiding and running away from the stressor.

How Stress = Growth

The clearest analogy that most of us get about how stress promotes growth comes from the gym. Working out with the right amount of intensity is a stressor. Sure, we can do recovery workouts, like yoga, walks, and stretching, but the classic pumping iron puts stress on our bodies. Looking at this purely from the physical dimension of health first, this stress stimulates growth which in turn builds bigger and stronger muscles to handle more weight or reps over time. Adequate recovery is also required though so that we don’t just keep breaking down further, which leads to no progress and even overtraining, which is the exercise equivalent of burnout.

To complicate things further, our mental health can also dictate this pathway to productive growth or overtraining. If we view the training process as a positive because it allows us to build more physical resilience, our training trends towards that progress. But if we view it as too hard and uncomfortable to push a little bit further each training session, we tend to not make progress.

And this is also how our mindset can impact how we handle other stressors too. If your boss adds one more project to your desk and you believe that it’s overwhelming, it will be. But when you tell yourself you can handle it and get better or learn something new because of it, you’re heading more in the right direction with your stress mindset.

When we start to recognize these different scenarios in our lives more often, we gain power over the impacts these stressors have, allowing us to rise to the opportunity to grow from it and not see stress as an enemy.